More car theft shenanigans

Back in May, I posted about some of the most expensive cars being the easiest to steal.  I was reading BoingBoing today and came across a related story.  It seems if you have one of these expensive car security systems, insurers consider your car unstealable — if it’s reported stolen, you must be involved.  This is a highly ignorant stance as there is no such thing as “absolutely secure.”  The best part of the story is the revelation that many of these systems have an override.  In the case of the story’s writer, his Civic’s startup security can be bypassed with a series of pulls on the emergency break.

Overrides render a security system absolutely useless against a professional thief.  The same can be said in the computer world — any system with a backdoor is of no use against an experienced cracker.

Southern Ohio Exchange Users

I’m sorry, Chris:  I’ve been sitting on your request for too long.

If you’re in Southwest Ohio, and interested in Microsoft Exchange, check out the first meeting of the Southern Ohio Exchange Users Group.  The first meeting will be September 12th, at the Cincinnati area Microsoft office.  Chris Haaker organized the group so check out his blog and ask him any questions you have about the meeting or the group.

Cabling prices are weird

Wow. I’ve been extremely lax in posting lately.

I’m not going to go on a rant about Monster Cable’s ridiculous prices because that would be beating a dead horse. Plenty of others have gone on and on about it.

I was looking for additional optical audio cables about a week and a half ago. When I bought most of my home entertainment center stuff two years ago I was able to find some 6 ft. GE brand cables at Circuit City for under $10. This was great because almost every other brand I found was well over $20. Some were over $40.

Since I had such luck at Circuit City last time, I decided to try them again. No dice. They had GE cables but no optical audio. Their other brands were $20 – $40+ for 3 ft cables. I went on to Microcenter and found both 12 and 24 ft. cables for about $25. I don’t need cables that long so I decided to continue looking for cheaper, shorter cables. I then went to Best Buy. At first, it looked like I was going to have the same problem as at Circuit City. The cheapest 3 ft. cables I found were about $25. The cheapest 6ft. cables were about $30.

Disgusted, I just about gave up hope. I then remembered the optical output on my Xbox and Xbox 360. It was a standard optical output as I was able to use one of the cables I bought 2 years ago on either of them. I decided to head over to the video games section to see if they had any cables. I ended up finding 9 ft. optical audio cables branded as being for the Xbox 360.  $15.  I doublechecked to make sure they looked like standard optical cables and sure enough, they were.  Craziness, I tell you.